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（英会話リスニングスクリプト）
After years of building up welfare states,
most Western European countries are now finding that it
is necessary to reduce welfare handouts.
The governments simply do not have enough
money to meet expenses.
The people who created the welfare state
believed that citizens should be protected from the cradle
to the grave.
They believed that the state should provide
health care, social security, education, unemployment benefit,
and farm subsidies.
However, in many cases, such as in unemployment
benefit, people began to regard the handouts as a right,
not something that was available to help them through a
difficult time in their lives.
This resulted in a lot of people not bothering
to work, knowing that the government will pay their rent
and give them enough money to survive.
Of course, these days, few governments can
afford to be paying a large part of the workforce to do
nothing.
Opponents of the welfare state say that
the state should only provide a safety net for the poor,
so nobody starves or dies because they cannot afford medical
treatment.
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